Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
I also would like to thank Mr. Noël for being here this morning and for sharing his observations with us and his experience in the field of legislation and studies on poverty.
My question may also be rather broad. This morning, I had prepared a number of technical questions which may seem too easy to you. I'm somewhat puzzled by what we are doing here, in part. I bring it up before the committee on occasion and I'll just tell it like it is.
In my view, some aggravating factors for poverty are a result of ill-suited policies or unimplemented ones, and of measures that have been eliminated. In fact you raised one of these policies on two occasions, employment insurance. It is a glaring aggravating factor implemented by the two political parties which have held power. I do not want to enter into the partisan fray, but I simply want to deal with the constraints imposed on people to prevent them from accessing employment insurance.
On that point, you said that the increase in social assistance benefits did not decrease people's interest for work. On the contrary, there has been a notated increase in the number of people in the labour market, which counters the view that receiving employment insurance benefits discourages people from going to work. That is practically how things are stated by other political parties.
Do you not believe we should clearly identify the aggravating factors for poverty in the measures taken by governments over the last few years? That way we would not be doing meaningless work. As an aside, I would add that if there is no political will, no firm desire to eliminate poverty, if we do not create legislation followed by policy and advisory councils, as was done in Quebec, it will be very difficult to deal with this.
I warned you my question would be broad, but it stems from a genuine desire to fight poverty.